Semiconductor supply chains are increasingly getting exposed to a variety of security attacks such as Trojan insertion, cloning, counterfeiting, reverse engineering, piracy of Intellectual Property (IP) or Integrated Circuit (IC) and side-channel analysis due to involvement of untrusted parties. Camouflaging is a technique of hiding the circuit functionality of logic gates. A subset of the gates can be chosen for camouflaging to make piracy impossible or extremely hard.
Camouflaging of gates using dummy contacts can realize three functions at the cost of approximately five times the area and power overhead. Process changes can be required to implement dummy contacts. For example, the manufacturing process needs to support generating a hollow via in order to create the dummy contact. Dummy contacts fail to force exhaustive reverse engineering by attackers.
Programmable standard cells can require signal routing for each camouflaged gate. However, current methods of programmable standard cells can require costly manufacturing, such as requiring extra masks. The current methods of programmable standard cells can provide incomplete camouflage by leaving layout clues, increasing design overhead, or offering limited reverse engineering resistance.